


Twenty, Thirty, Forty

by psocoptera



Series: Thirty Fic [24]
Category: Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe - Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Genre: 30Fic, College, Disturbing Themes, Family Relationships - Freeform, Future Fic, Identity Issues, M/M, canonical hate crime, canonical long-term incarceration
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-22
Updated: 2016-06-22
Packaged: 2018-07-16 15:57:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,491
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7274404
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/psocoptera/pseuds/psocoptera
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>I didn't know how you fell in love when you were fifteen, when you were hardly even yourself yet, and stayed in love when you were twenty, or thirty, or our parents' age.</i>
</p><p>Three snapshots of the future.</p><p>This is a standalone story in a long-term ongoing writing project connected by characters being or turning thirty.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is a work in three parts. The first chapter stands alone, and is about Ari and Dante in college, dealing with their identities as both gay and Mexican, particularly how out they want to be about the former. I have separated the second and third parts into a second chapter because the third part deals with the parole of Bernardo Mendoza from prison, and I thought that some people might prefer to read only the part that focuses more on Ari and Dante's relationship. There are additional content notes at the beginning of the second chapter and discussion at the end about some of the choices I made in deciding to write about that aspect of _Aristotle and Dante_.

**April 28, 1992**

I brought home the MEChA button the day Dante got us the freedom ring necklaces. We got home at the same time, for once, and not too late. Yesterday I had been at the library until it closed. Tomorrow he was signed up for a late-evening darkroom slot, and I had already asked if he wanted me to pick him up in the truck afterwards. He had said he was going to ride his bike like he usually did when he got to sleep in and I was going in to campus early to use the gym. So I had hardly seen him yesterday and I would hardly see him tomorrow, but today, here we were, in our little parking lot together, the sun low and glaring orange through the row of eucalyptus behind our apartment complex.

"We should go up," Dante said, taking off his helmet and running his hand through his sweaty hair.

I nodded and took his bike, and he went ahead of me to open the doors. It was funny how we had these little routines even though we rarely got home together. Maybe that was what living with someone for almost three years did.

When we got up the stairs he opened our front door, and I leaned his bike against the wall in the hall, and he closed the door and said "Ari," and I kissed him. Just an ordinary "hello, how was your day" kind of kiss.

"Ari," he said again, when I let him go. "I got us something."

"Is it dinner?" I asked. We had leftover beans and rice in the fridge like always - beans were cheap, and easy to make in bulk when we could spare time to cook - but sometimes a man craved meat.

"No," Dante said. "It's - these."

He opened his backpack and took out a little brown paper bag, and dumped it out into his hand. It looked like a tangle at first, and then I saw it was two identical necklaces. Six bright rainbow metal rings threaded on a black cord.

I had seen necklaces like this, on campus. Michelle in my writer's workshop. A guy I sometimes sat near in history. Jeff, who sometimes brought copy jobs from the philosophy department when I was on-shift in the xerox center, had the same rings on a bracelet around his wrist.

"I'm not sure I'm a jewelry guy," I said.

It was the wrong thing to say, I knew that, but it felt easier than having the conversation. Of course all it meant was that we were having the conversation anyway but starting it badly.

"You're not a jewelry guy."

"No." I put a pan on the stove to start reheating some beans.

"You weren't a kissing in public guy for the kiss-in either."

"Neither are you most of the time."

"Do you know how many of the LGBA guys aren't out to their parents? That both of us are, that we have their support - you could call it an opportunity. Maybe even an obligation."

It was true we were out to our parents, and we were both out to our faculty advisors, too. But I didn't like how Dante said that, like good luck with six adults gave us an obligation to everyone else.

"I just don't feel like I need to make a point of it all the time," I said.

"Oh," Dante said, picking up my backpack, where I'd pinned the MEChA button right in the middle. "But you need to make a point of this?"

Of course he had noticed it. Dante was a noticer. Always looking with those artist eyes.

I didn't answer right away. I stirred the beans. Our first year at UCSD, two years ago, we had been overwhelmed just figuring out how to go to college. Just figuring out how to _live_. We had gotten an apartment, because neither of us were too sure about the dorms, but that meant we had to do everything. Cook! Clean! Laundry! Pay the rent! Buy toilet paper! Our mothers had tried to teach us that stuff but it had never seemed real until we were on our own. And then last year, somehow all our courses had gotten harder, so Dante was in the studio all the time drawing people with their clothes off, and I was beating my head against a badly-chosen fill for my science requirement, and we were both endlessly followed by enormous stacks of books that needed reading. This year wasn't really any easier, but we had both figured out how to manage it, or something, because we were finally going to meetings and concerts and having the college experience, as Mrs. Quintana put it. Only the meetings Dante kept going back to were the lesbians and gays, and the meetings I kept going back to were the Chicanos.

The button on my backpack didn't call for revolution or anything. It was just the MEChA motto, _La union hace la fuerza_ , and the logo, the eagle with dynamite and the macuahuitl, the Aztec sword. Maybe you could see that as kind of militant. Mostly people talked about UCSD needing more Chicano professors, and things like who still needed to submit their receipts from buying party supplies or putting gas in the student-activities van after going to a protest against border patrol violence. I hadn't gone to the protest. Or the party. The button was the first thing I had done, really.

Dante was still waiting to see if I would answer. He knew he had to be patient with me and my words. Usually I liked that.

"I like them," I said, meaning MEChA.

"Did you get me one?" Dante asked.

I hadn't. I hadn't thought of it, and that seemed like an awful thing to say, but then I thought it was better than Dante thinking I hadn't gotten him one on purpose. Dante still worried about whether he was really Mexican. He didn't need to wonder if I thought he wasn't.

"I didn't think of it," I said.

"Maybe you could," Dante said. "Maybe we could each wear both."

Nobody at MEChA wore pride jewelry. Or maybe they did and I hadn't noticed. If Dante had ever come with me, he would know. He would have noticed.

"I don't know," I said.

I wanted to tell Dante that I wasn't sure if you could wear both, and I wanted to tell Dante that I wasn't sure sometimes how to _be_ both, and I wanted to tell Dante that if he took care of us being gay and I took care of us being Mexican maybe that wasn't such a bad division of labor, just like I kept track of paying the rent and he kept track of the electricity and phone. And I wanted to tell Dante that I _did_ want to wear those six shiny rings, and I wanted to tell Dante that sometimes I still worried all the time about someone hurting him again, and maybe we should switch our division of labor so it was me they would come after.

"You're burning the beans," he said.

Dinner was acrid and silent. I felt worse than I had in a long time, since high school maybe. I wasn't sure if the worst thing was that I hadn't gotten Dante a button, or that I hadn't taken the necklace. Or if it was all the things I couldn't figure out how to say.

After dinner we settled at opposite ends of the sofa with our current reading. Dante had a packet of xeroxed articles. I wondered if I had xeroxed them.

All four of our combined parents had asked us at one point or another if we were sure we wanted to live together for college. We could have lived at home and gone to UTEP and saved some money. Spent fewer hours doing work-study, making copies or answering phones for the university like Dante did. We could have gone to NMSU and come home from Las Cruces on the weekends for our mothers to do our laundry and feed us tamales.

Our senior year of high school we had looked at the whole map of the United States, and all the envelopes and brochures that had come pouring in after we took our SATs. We had combined our stacks then arranged them in piles, West Coast, East Coast, Midwest, South. I don't remember who had said no to Chicago first but we had pushed it aside, and then the whole region, Oberlin and Michigan and more. I had wanted to go somewhere that wasn't home, somewhere that would be different, and we agreed, awkwardly, that we didn't want to go somewhere where we might be the only Mexicans. We had almost settled on New York - New York had everybody, Mexicans and Dominicans and Puertoriqueños and the whole Spanish-speaking world, or San Francisco, Berkeley, where the Quintanas had met. They were two centers of the world, where big things were happening, where a place might be found for two boys who liked to hold hands sometimes, and it had surprised and confused everyone when I had put my finger on the map on El Paso and traced west, Interstate 10 to Interstate 8, all the way to the coast. "Here", I had said. San Diego was twinned with Tijuana, across a wall, the way El Paso was twinned with Juárez across the river, and sometimes I thought that was what had seemed necessary, that border, like I didn't trust myself to carry the border with me in my heart.

If Dante had said no, I would have gone to New York. If Dante had said he needed to paint fjords I would have gone to Norway, or wherever they have fjords. Of course we wanted to live together for college. Why would I ever sleep alone with my bad dreams if I could sleep in Dante's arms? It had been good, a couple of _tejanos_ meeting _californios_ , the same and different. And we liked that if we took turns sleeping and driving, one long day and night across the mountains and desert could get us home. We liked to go back whenever we could manage, so Dante could see his baby brother and we could both see our parents.

Right now I hated it. Resentfully, I wanted to be home so our parents could sort us out. They could remind us that we loved each other and that if we talked about it, we could find the right answer for us about the freedom rings. I didn't want to do that work. I wanted Dante to throw his highlighter and articles on the floor and put his head in my lap and I didn't want to have to wonder if we were growing apart. I didn't know how you fell in love when you were fifteen, when you were hardly even yourself yet, and stayed in love when you were twenty, or thirty, or our parents' age.

At the other end of the couch, Dante sighed. "Look, Ari," he started, and then the phone rang.

I thought it would be my mother, or one of his parents, but it wasn't. I couldn't tell who it was.

"Yeah," Dante said. "Okay, okay, cool."

Definitely not his parents.

"That was Diana," he said when he hung up. "You know, the marine biologist? Who draws all those microscope studies? She says there's an amazing bloom at Scripps Beach, and we should come down to see it."

I was tired and in the middle of a fight, but it was a yes that didn't get trapped in my throat, so I said it. "Okay."

Getting into the truck at night and making our way to the beach felt like driving out to the desert. Of course the desert wasn't patrolled by parking officers who might not think my student pass qualified us for the place I found for the truck. And the unmistakeable salt smell of the beach in the dark was not the smell of desert rain. The sky here was cloudy and starless. We weren't sure exactly where Diana was. I didn't know what Dante thought we were going to see. Algae, he had said in the truck. Seaweed?

"Look," he whispered, as we walked out onto the sand.

The waves were glowing.

I blinked, but they really were. They were blue where they crashed and broke, like someone had run blue Christmas lights along the beach under water, except it was obviously the water itself, the whole entire wave, that was glowing. Someone in my poetry workshop had done a piece about taking a tour to see a nuclear reactor, how the water had glowed blue from radiation, and I wondered if the big power plant up the coast was leaking, or something. If maybe we shouldn't be here.

"Shit," I said.

"It's algae," Dante said. "Diana said what kind, but I didn't catch it."

We stood there in the dark, a foot and a half apart, watching the glowing waves. They could have been eerie, but somehow they weren't; just unreal, but good the way the ocean always was. We had driven to the beach our first full day in San Diego. I had never seen the ocean, and Dante said it was different than the beach in Chicago. That it was breathing louder.

"Hey," someone yelled, "They're letting us out on the pier!"

I had jumped away from Dante when he yelled. I turned back to him. "Should we?"

"Why not?"

We walked over to the pier, and out along it to where people were clustered at the railings, out by the surf line. It was even clearer from above how it was something about the churn of the water that made the glow.

"Hey," Dante nudged me, "Look at that!"

Farther out, someone was flicking a flashlight on and off, pointing down into the water. We walked further down the pier to see. When the flashlight flashed, fish darted away from the spot of light, leaving a starburst of bright glowing trails behind them.

"It's like fireworks," Dante said. "Fish fireworks."

"Dante," I said, and I took his hand, and pulled him further along the pier, and I kissed him. We were the farthest people out, and mostly everyone was looking down at the water, but anyone could have seen just by our shape in the dark that we were two men kissing. But I couldn't be there with Dante, seeing the most magical thing I had ever seen, and not kiss him.

"You went quiet," Dante said. "At home."

"I'm sorry," I said. Apologizing helped, like it always did. I tried to sort quickly through everything in my head. 

"I'll wear any rings you give me," I said finally, figuring that was the most important thing, and from Dante's little intake of breath, I thought he knew everything I meant.

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> MEChA is the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (today Chicanx). I don't know how politically or socially active the UCSD MEChA chapter was in the early 90s, but I believe all of the activities mentioned are things a MEChA chapter might do. (I'm only personally familiar with MEChA through a dim recollection of there being a branch at my San Diego high school in the mid-90s.) Freedom rings were designed by David Spada in 1991 and were widespread enough to be mentioned in the NYT a year later. (I remember first seeing them at my high school in about 1994.) Dinoflagellate blooms are totally a real thing that sometimes happens at San Diego beaches. This chapter was originally set on April 30th but I realized Dante and Ari's moods would probably be different with the Rodney King riots going on a couple of hours to the north.
> 
> Please feel free to let me know if something here feels inappropriate or problematic to you! I've tried to make these versions of Ari and Dante as anchored in time and space and race and class and gender and sexuality as their Sáenz originals, but I'm writing from very far away in a lot of aspects. I know I might not see something that someone standing somewhere else can see.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content notes: references to the illness and death of a parent. Reference to temporary family estrangement. Vague reference to Sept. 11th, more specific reference to the US invasion of Afghanistan. Mention of psychological effects of long-term incarceration and solitary confinement. Discussion of a canonical hate crime. Mention of the possibility of misgendering a dead character. Reintegration of a family member into the family following a hate crime and sentence served.

**December 31st, 2001**

"2002 has got to be better," Dante said. "It's just got to."

It was New Year's Eve, and we were hitting the champagne early and often, alone in my parents' living room. My dad had been too tired to stay up and my mom had gone with him.

"The universe has no guarantees," I said. I thought of an exception but I didn't want to say it.

It had been an utter shitshow of a year. Dante had totaled his car trying to get off the road in a sudden freak hailstorm, skidding into a post. My publisher had canceled my contract after my second book didn't sell as well as they wanted. Dante's beloved little brother Gabe, who he'd hardly gone three days without seeing since we'd moved back to El Paso in 1995, had hit some wretched adolescent phase and refused to speak to Dante for three months beyond the dinner table pleasantries the Quintanas insisted on. They were speaking again but their relationship was still strained.

And those were the things we were going to look back on as things we'd survived. My dad had gotten sick during the summer, and while the doctors said treatment was possible, it was brutal. Agonizing to see him go through. It was more awful than when I had broken my legs and I was more scared than I had been after Dante's assault. We'd barely made it through the summer and then suddenly the whole world was falling apart, and kids who were much, much closer to Gabe's age than ours were funneling through Fort Bliss to Afghanistan, and who knew when that would ever end.

"A toast," Dante said. "To the universe discovering kindness."

I clinked my glass against his, and drank.

"I know it can," I said, snuggling into his shoulder. "It gave me you."

"You are _plastered_ ," Dante said fondly.

"I'm not," I said. I wasn't. Definitely buzzed, but just enough for everything I couldn't do anything about to seem like it wasn't tonight's problem. We were only on our second bottle of champagne.

"You are," Dante said. "Let's play nostalgia."

I snorted. "You make it sound like a card game."

"A shoe-throwing game," Dante said, and then held up one finger. "Point!"

"You can't score points in nostalgia." Dante had gotten better over the years about letting me make up some of the rules, but this one he rejected out of hand.

"You can pick a year or a topic," he said, "And the other person has to come up with one good memory. 1995."

"The house, obviously." After losing the fight over Proposition 187 in the '94 election, we'd both felt burnt out on California, and had moved back to El Paso the next spring. The last of my money from selling Aunt Ophelia's house had been just enough for a down payment on a tiny but perfect house we liked to call the smallest house in El Paso. "1997."

"You sold your book!" Dante said. "1993."

"Graduation? No, wait, that day we kissed under the Sun God in the rain."

"Nice," Dante said. "1992."

"You skipped my turn. U2 at Jack Murphy Stadium!"

Dante pouted, and I snickered. "You were supposed to say fish fireworks."

"Fish fireworks of course," I agreed. "1996."

Dante frowned. He let out a slow breath. "Shit," he said. "All I can think of is when your brother let you visit."

It wasn't a good memory. It was hard, and sad, and good only in the sense that before, I had thought of a hundred ways it could be horrible, and after, the uncertainty had resolved. I had made myself keep writing to him, was still, but it wasn't the same as it had been before I understood.

"What about _your_ brother," I said. "When we took Gabe to Western Playland, and he said it was the best day of his life."

"That was a good day."

I tried to think about little seven-year-old Gabe shrieking and giggling on the rides, and not thirteen-year-old Gabe looking away from Dante like he wished he didn't exist, and definitely not Bernardo, and whether Dad would ever be well enough to make it out there again. Whether they would ever see each other again.

"This century sucks," I whispered.

Dante poured me another glass in silence, and I drank it, and held his hand, and waited for a better year.

*

**August 31st, 2011**

It was 101 degrees the day I brought my brother home. It was the day after my fortieth birthday, which Dante and I had celebrated by having what was possibly the last sex we were ever going to have in an empty house.

"That's pessimistic," Dante had said. "He'll go out during the day, at least. You said he prays, right? He can go to Mass on Sunday and we'll do our own communion." He waggled his eyebrows.

"He says the Rosary, the parts he can remember. But he's not going to think to go to Mass, and it feels weird to tell him to."

Dante had met as often as I had with the social worker who was helping us with the whole thing, but I wasn't sure he really understood how it was with Bernardo. He had met him once. Dante had told me he had ended up talking about the documentary he was working on then about Texas bird sanctuaries, and Bernardo had seemed about as politely interested as anyone else. Not talkative, but not confused, or paranoid, or mutely obedient. A good day. I'd seen some bad ones.

The Bernardo spat out by the prison exit procedure that day was closer to mute. He kept stopping and blinking. When I clicked open the doors on the Silverado I thought he was going to cry. Halfway-house beds were in short supply - or prisoners in Texas were in oversupply - so he was coming straight from discharge back to our house. He was quiet the whole long drive home. He just sat back there blinking. Dante exchanged some glances with me in the front seat, and eventually put on the radio so we had something to listen to. Katy Perry. Lady Gaga. Whatever happened to rock. What a middle-aged thought to have. 

"So," I said, when I finally pulled into our driveway. "I guess it looks familiar."

I realized it wasn't a great thing to say before I'd even finished saying it. Bernardo hadn't been there in thirty-six years. It wasn't even the same colors any more - Dante and I had had it fixed up after we moved in, after Mom had gone to live with my sister. I had shown Bernardo pictures of the renovation, of course, but you never quite noticed as much, in pictures.

Dante unlocked the front door and Sunny hurried over to see who we were bringing home. Sunny was technically "Sun God", because her split face had reminded Dante of the wild coloring of the statue at UCSD, but I wasn't going to shout "Sun God" at the park.

"Hey, Sunny," I said. "Look, it's Bernardo, like I told you."

He had seen her pictures too. He squatted down and let her sniff at him. She seemed wary - he probably smelled like all sorts of strange things.

"Let's go for a walk," Dante told her. Of course that went over big. Once they had gone, I used the excuse of the renovation to show Bernardo the kitchen, the bathroom, the bedroom we'd decided would be his. I had set it up with the things I thought he would need and then Dante had gone and added extra stuff so it didn't look so bare. We had stopped for fast food on the way back so it was easy enough to make sure Bernardo knew he had a toothbrush and towels and that sort of thing, and then tell him I was turning in early. I told him what time I would be getting up, and that I would help him find breakfast stuff in the kitchen in the morning. The social worker had said not to throw too much at him at once.

He nodded back when I wished him goodnight, and closed his door.

Alone in the master bedroom, I flopped back on the bed. It was stifling hot in the bedroom - we had a window AC to cool the living room and kitchen for Sunny, but we kept the bedroom doors shut so it wasn't trying to cool the whole house. Bernardo's room was probably awful too. I hoped he knew he could open his window, not that the outdoors had cooled off much yet.

I thought about how baffled people had been over our decision to take in Bernardo. "I don't get it," Gabe had said. He had come back from Austin for Easter and we had seized the opportunity to talk in person about what we expected to happen if and when Bernardo was given parole. "You could foster a gay teenager," Gabe had argued. "You could adopt, I don't know, a severely disturbed four-year-old, and they might turn out to be a great person! You could get another dog! But, seriously, there's so many homeless gay kids, I don't get how you guys of all people would rather take care of someone who _killed_ one."

"We don't know for sure they were gay," I had said. Gabe had looked at me in disbelief. "No, listen," I had said. "Here's what we know. Ruben Santos was nineteen, estranged from his family, living in a squat. Probably doing sex work to survive. He was malnourished at the time of death. Maybe he was gay. Maybe he was transgender, I mean, maybe _she_ was _Ruby_ Santos or something and we don't even have her name right, we don't know, because whoever that person was, they got wiped out of history by my brother. I'm not in denial about that. David Young, the other guy, he was seventeen, he played baseball, he was in juvie for arson. Maybe he was gonna grow up to coach Little League. Maybe he was going to burn down some houses, _we'll never know_." Everything I had ever figured out about myself, after seventeen, after nineteen, they hadn't gotten to do any of that. "It's not like we can just say, Ruben should be alive instead of Bernardo, let's adopt a Ruben and Bernardo will go away. He's still here, what do you do about him."

"We actually applied to be foster parents back when Texas was trying to make it illegal," Dante had put in, giving me a chance to take a few deep breaths. "There was no room in the smallest house in El Paso, and, I don't know, we weren't sure we were really ready, maybe we were just doing it to make a point. It's true, if we had a kid now, we wouldn't be doing this, but we didn't want to sell the house back then, and by the time we were talking about it again the parole thing was on the horizon."

My family had never written letters to the judge or the parole board, asking for a lighter sentence or an earlier release. My mom had said it didn't feel right, when it wasn't like the families of the boys he had killed could ask for less time for them to be dead. Still, Bernardo had been a compliant prisoner for the past quarter-century, after his early stints in solitary, and with his sentence what it was, and prison crowding what it was, he was the kind of case that was going to get dumped back on the outside world sooner or later.

My mom had not been able to bear the thought of him homeless on the streets somewhere, and she had been guiltily, horribly terrified of whether she could handle it if he came home. He wasn't going to be able to live on his own - he lost track of the month and the year, he sometimes thought the Devil was watching him, or the government, he shut down if he had to solve the simplest problem for himself. He had started writing back to me when the same priest who had gotten him going on the Rosary had sat him down with a pen and paper, some prison ministry thing to reconnect inmates with their families. When you got down to it I couldn't bear the thought of him homeless either. Sometimes across the table in the visitation room he would turn a certain way, or say something, and I would think, "this is the biggest living piece of my Dad I have left." How could I ever go out to the desert with Dante if I was wondering whether my brother was sleeping under the stars somewhere, not by choice, but just because there was nowhere else? Mom had cried, when Dante and I told her we were thinking about selling our tiny house and moving somewhere where we'd have a room for Bernardo when the time came, and she had admitted that she'd talked with my sisters about moving in with one of them, after Dad had died, and it had just been the thought of Bernardo holding her back.

So here I was, in my parents' old house. Possibly I had been conceived in this very room. My parents hadn't lived here yet when my brother was born. He was 51, and we had to go check in with his parole officer tomorrow, maybe buy him some more clothes, start coming up with things he could do all day. The social worker thought he might be able to work, with good supervision - he'd done laundry in the prison, we'd written down some commercial laundry companies to look into. Or there was always Goodwill, or the Salvation Army. Dante and I weren't fans of the Salvation Army, and we weren't sure it would be a great environment for Bernardo, given everything. But he couldn't just rot in my childhood bedroom, either. We had asked Bernardo about six different ways if he was going to be okay living with two men, who were gay men, who were a couple, who were married in Massachusetts if not in Texas, who kissed each other when they got home and slept in the same bed. The last time he had muttered, seemingly out of nowhere, that "his cellmate awhile ago had been a good guy". I had no idea if he had meant that his cellmate was gay, if he was admitting to a prison relationship, or what. Maybe someday Bernardo would tell us more. I had wondered a few times whether Ruben had really been a stranger. Some of these "gay panic" cases, it seemed like it took awhile for the panic to set in. More like hate crimes that were partly self-hate. Bernardo had just said "wow" when I had shown him my ring and told him that Dante and I had flown to Boston with Mom and the Quintanas to get married. He had let me show him the ten pictures I had been allowed to bring in. I had sent him copies in the mail later.

I wanted Dante to come home, to hold my hand and tell me we were doing the right thing, or, no, to tell me six more times that _he_ was really okay living with Bernardo. Over half our lives ago, I had broken Julian Enriquez's nose for hurting Dante. Now I was bringing home someone who had killed someone who might have been a lot like him. What a great husband.

Like he knew I was wishing for him, I heard the front door open, and Sunny's various coming-home noises. I heard Bernardo's door open, too, and, curious, I stepped out to see what was going on.

Bernardo had come out of his room and was kneeling down with Sunny. He was petting her with both hands, so he almost had his arms around her. Their faces were in each other's necks, and her tail was saying that she was making a friend. Dante was putting her leash away and watching them.

Ruben Santos would be 55. David Young would be 51 like my brother. Maybe David would be meeting his first grandchild. Maybe Ruben's books would sell better than mine.

I went over to Dante. Bernardo didn't look up from Sunny. I took Dante's hand and I kissed him. I don't know if Bernardo still didn't look up. It was a little more than a "hello" kiss. A "thank you for coming home" kiss. A "thank you for staying to make this crazy backwards family with me and my old-man brother" kiss.

"Ari," Dante said, squeezing my hand. I turned and we watched Bernardo and Sunny together. I wondered if I would be able to teach Bernardo to drive. I wondered if he would want to drive out to the desert, if his parole allowed it. I wondered if he would feel free out there, or just alone. I wondered if this was how my parents had felt, when I had been so young and angry and lost. I had learned to live without shame. Bernardo would have to learn to live with it. Maybe he already knew. Maybe this was the best he would ever do.

"You can turn the lights out when you go to bed," I told Bernardo. "We'll leave our door open so Sunny can come in, her bed is in our room, but if your door is open she might come check on you at some point, Gabe said she came in every night when he visited."

Bernardo nodded. I tugged on Dante's hand and kept hold of it to lead him back to our bedroom. Behind us, very softly, probably to Sunny, I heard Bernardo say, "See you tomorrow."

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've invented names and biographical details for Bernardo's two victims. In deciding to write a story about one way that Ari might have to grapple with the existence of Bernardo down the road, I didn't want to write a purely perpetrator-centered narrative. I've tried to give them a real presence in the story through Ari wondering about them and being aware that the world has lost them.
> 
> I don't know how realistic it is for Bernardo to be paroled. We know he killed when he was 15 and again while still in juvenile detention, which I've imagined happened when he was about 17. Depending on how long his trials took, and the exact crimes he was convicted of (2nd degree murder or voluntary manslaughter seems most likely), and the sentences received, he might have been in adult prison since the age of 18, and be considered for parole a minimum of 30 years later, or about 2008. I imagine that that would sound like "basically forever" to teen Ari, and then at some point in his 30s it would hit him that it was actually within his life planning horizon. I'm not sure whether I think this is the decision that Ari "really" would make. I guess only Sáenz could say for sure, if that's a future of the characters he's ever considered. I'm also not trying to take a stand here on what ought to happen in general after a heinous crime. I tried to be careful to refer to Bernardo's killings, particularly the first one, in terms that didn't downplay or excuse them. However, I think the questions of "what the hell should we do when criminals come back to their communities/what the hell should we do when criminals are our family members" are real questions. Like I said after the first chapter, I'm writing from very far away; please feel free to tell me if you think I've done a bad job with this topic, or if you think it's a part of the novel that shouldn't be fanficced, or that I in particular shouldn't have touched.


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